Marx: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) 2nd Edition, Kindle Edition by Peter Singer (Oxford University Press)

This is a remarkably clear introduction to the thought of Karl Marx. I was a little dubious when I picked it up (I read 3 or 4 of the Very Short Introduction books each year), since most of my knowledge of Singer is through his work either on Animal Ethics, Utilitarianism, or his critique of George W. Bush. In fact, I became a vegetarian 25 years ago after reading Singer and Gandhi at the same time. Marx, though, is a horse of a different color. I was simply not confident that he would write as well on the founder of Marxism as well as he did on practical ethics. If anything, he turned out to write even more clearly on Marx than anything else I've read.

The problem with Marx is that he wrote so much, much of it in advanced draft form, that one can extract several different Marx's from his pages. It isn't that he is inconsistent that his thinking is constantly in flux as he considers one or another aspect of the issues surrounding capitalism. There truly is no final version of Marx's thought, but rather interim versions. The various books and manuscripts almost serve as commentaries on the other books and manuscripts. The trick is to extract the core of what Marx thought without unduly distorting his work as a whole and without reducing him to a caricature. Singer does a great job of highlighting major themes and trends in Marx's thought while not losing the sense of the difficult of determining with finality precisely what Marx wrote.

The importance of a book like this cannot be overstressed. Anyone who knows anything at all about Marx knows that he would have been appalled at the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century. As Singer rightly points out, Marx would unquestionably have been a victim of one of the purges. Whatever complicity Marx had with the excesses of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao is tenuous and debatable (though given that all three cited Marx as their inspiration means that Marx's responsibility for what followed can be legitimately discussed, even if he is exonerated). Not everything he wrote about Capitalism (a term he invented) has proven to be true (though a great deal that he wrote remains shockingly relevant). Those who in 1989 delightedly proclaimed that history had refuted Marx got it all wrong. The fact is that all of us today, even political and economic conservatives, have had our consciousness completely altered by Marx. Nearly all history is done today with unexamined assumptions that we took from Marx. No one would undertake a study of any historical topic without a consideration of the socio-economic factors involved. Sociology, philosophy, political science, economics, and virtually every subject one can consider has been deeply informed by Marxist ideas. Those proclaiming Marx the loser in 1989 got it all wrong: he had won way before then. He has shaped the modern mind as fully as Freud, Martin Luther, Newton, or Darwin. We think through Marxist categories, even when we oppose him.

This is just one reason why it is so important to understand what he was about. There are many other very good elementary intros to Marx's thought. Robert Heilbroner's book on Marx is a great one. Ernest Mandel has an excellent short introduction to Marx's economic theory. But I would put Singer's book up there with those. If you are looking for a clear first introduction to Marx, you can do far worse than this.